A New Foundation for Nominal Isabelle

Pitts et al introduced a beautiful theory about names and binding based on the notions of permutation and support. The engineering challenge is to smoothly adapt this theory to a theorem prover environment, in our case Isabelle/HOL. We present a formalisation of this work that differs from our earlier approach in two important respects: First, instead of representing permutations of pairs of atoms, we now use a more abstract representation based on functions. Second, whereas the earlier work modeled different sorts of atoms using different types, we now introduce a unified atom type that includes all sorts of atoms. Interestingly, we allow swappings, that is permutations build from two atoms, to be ill-sorted. As a result of these design changes, we can iron out inconveniences for the user, considerably simplify proofs and also drastically reduce the amount of custom ML-code. Furthermore we can extend the capabilities of Nominal Isabelle to deal with variables that carry additional in...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ITP
• Authors: Brian Huffman, Christian Urban
• Keywords: ITP 2010, Mathematics, Nominal Isabelle, Permutations, Theorem Prover Environment